There are plenty of back-up software applications out there, and I've tried a lot of them.

After some which have failed to restore my computer after a crash I took someone else's advice and got Norton Ghost (no relation to me or Norton Music). I back up to an external USB drive daily.

The nice thing about Ghost is that it creates an "image" of your hard drive, and when you restore it, it restores it in exactly the same way you left it when you backed it up.

I assign two back ups. The first one is incremental which means it only records the changes in the back up and I do this every night. It takes about 5 minutes. I also assign 3 "restore" points to that backup so that I can go back 3 days - very helpful if you get a virus, as you might not know it until you reboot your computer.

The second one is a total disk image which overwrites the data on the disk. I only do this about once a month as it takes more than an hour to complete. I have 2 "restore" points on this one, and actually back it up to a different external USB drive from the incremental backup.

I also do the incremental backup before I do any of the following: install a new program, defragment my hard drive, run my registry cleaner, or make any other major changes.

It has saved my butt more than once. Since I've been using Ghost, I've lost 2 hard drives on 2 computers (one on each), I've installed a new drive myself (I'm not technically inclined but it is simply a matter of taking screws out, unplugging the old, and plugging in the new), and restored the image from my backup disk. It's worked perfectly.

Ghost also has a "rescue" disk that allows you to boot your computer from your CD drive so if your hard drive is completely useless or if you install that new, blank hard drive you can boot with the CD and then run the restore software.

Having Ghost and 2 back-up hard drives has made my main music/business computer "fail-save".

I highly recommend it.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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